Shelly on Poetry and Racism... 150 years ago...

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

¶27
§192 The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to conceive. §193 The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. §194 Love became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. §00 It was as if the statues of Apollo, and the muses had been endowed with life and motion and had walked forth among their worshippers; so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world. §195 The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly; and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. §196 And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creations were poets; and language was the instrument of their art: "Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse". {{Dante, Inferno V.137}} The Provençal Trouveurs, or inventors preceeded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of Love. §197 It is impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explain how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous, and wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self. §198 Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch. §00 His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language: it is the idealized history of that period, and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. §199 His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise and the gradations of his own love and her loveliness by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most {{Sig. 10v}} glorious imagination of modern poetry. §200 The acutest critics have justly reversed the judgement of the vulgar and the order of the great acts of the "Divine Drama" in the measure of the admiration which they accord to the Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. §201 The latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting love. §202 Love which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of all the antients has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms, and superstition. §203 At successive intervals Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespear, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau and the great writers of our own age have celebrated the dominion of love; planting as it were trophies in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force. §204 The true relation borne to each other by the senses into which human kind is distributed has become less misunderstood; and if the error which confounded diversity with in equality of the powers of the two sexes has been partially recognized in the opinions and institutions of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which Chivalry was the law, and poets the prophets.


to read Shelly's entire 'Defence of Poetry' please go here: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display/displayprose.cfm?prosenum=6

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